There really does seem to be a lot of confusion regarding the pricing of Warhammer Online. You’ll remember that a couple of weeks back the EU prices were announced, and we called them into question, noticing they were simply conversions of Euro into Pound, not only very odd numbers, but numbers well above the competition. We nagged at the UK PR, Indigo Pearl, and they eventually came back to us with new prices in line with what we’d expect. Well, madly, it doesn’t end there.

The set-up for WAR is messy. Mythic, who previously created long-running MMO Dark Age Of Camelot, had a relationship with French company GOA to host their games in Europe. That was confusing enough, published by a mixture of KOCH, Wanadoo and GOA. The same plans were in place for the early days of WAR, with GOA set up to handle the European market. And then EA arrived, bags of money in both hands, and bought Mythic. But with deals already done with GOA, the result appears to be (and good grief, we have no clue for certain) that EA are handling N. American territories, with GOA taking care of Europe, and the communications between the two seeming muddled. Now it seems there’s a breakdown within just the one territory.

Rumours about UK price cut
This is a big one, naturally. As far as I know, these rumours origin from a blogger (forgot which) who called EA to ask about the UK prices, only to be told that they were lower than those announced in our Press Release last week.

As of now, the information we have at hand is those stated in named PR document. If there are any changes to the UK pricing, we will announce this. I’ve made enquiries about the truth behind these rumours, but I’m afraid I have nothing solid to go on so far.

This is peculiar news to us, as we were told by GOA’s PR representatives, Indigo Pearl (because it wasn’t complicated enough for them without introducing a 43rd company), the following:

“Please see below for the updated subs prices for WAR :

£8.99 per month

£25.17 for 3 months

£46.14 for 6 months

They could well be ameding the box price too but I will let you know.”

To double-stress, this announcement was preceeded by an Indigo Pearl email telling us,

“I’ve spoken to GOA about the prices and they’re going to review them for the UK and let me know Monday.”

Which would seem to imply that someone at GOA had said something, but apparently not told the GOA communications manager. Which wouldn’t seem a great plan. Perhaps there is a specific confusion between European and UK pricing, and that this distinction either isn’t understood by all, or simply doesn’t exist.

The moral of this story? Don’t be successful? I dunno. But flipping crikey, it seems WAR needs some sort of UN body to manage the various factions, allowing them to communicate with each other, before the game gets exclusively released for N64 in Mongolia. We have, of course, enquired to find out what on Earth is going on.

The pound at the moment, isn’t all that strong to be honest, it’s worth less now in euros than it has been in months.
So don’t count to much on your “strong” pound, because its relative value has been falling steadily for some time now.

Can’t be sure until after release. But unless EA-Mythic-GoA take deliberate steps to prevent it, it will be fairly straightforward to simply make a US account on Mythic’s WAR site and download a US client, either from Fileplanet or EA’s service.

And it doesn’t matter about the normal ups and downs of the money markets: the Euro will never be as strong as the Pound. There are a number of rather solid reasons for why this is the case, the main one being that the EU as an organisation is undemocratic, anti-competitive and intentionally obscure. The common market that was promised hasn’t happened because even the continental nations are just not suited to federalism like the American states are. Whilst the Dollar is worth almost the same in Florida as it is in Oklahoma, the Euro in Italy can often be worth a very different amount from the Euro in Ireland. Europe is not a mono-culture like the US, which is young and whilst having a diverse people, does not have diverse internal influences like Europe, which has nations almost a thousand years old.

Bumping Paul S’s question. If we want to throw in the towel and go US, how do we do that?

EDIT: missed Gorgeras’s answer. But I have a nasty sense there may be more to it than that.

Oh hell, may as well give GOA the benefit of the doubt for a couple of weeks. But if their apparent competence doesn’t improve, then knit me a Stars’n’Stripes and slap a Stetson on my head – I’ll be joining the Yanquis.

I just checked; it isn’t. The Pound today is worth more than the Euro.

And this is AFTER Reuters reports a slump in the Pound’s worth because of recession fears. Whilst it’s theoretically possible for the Euro to overtake the Pound, it isn’t likely in practice because most EU countries don’t have as liberal business laws as Britain and those that do like Poland have their workers attracted to Britain.

Gorgeras: That’s weight, not strength, the US Dollar, the Yen and the late DMark have never been worth more than one pound, but all have been stronger at some point. Put another way, the Turkish Lira didn’t get 1,000,000 times stronger when they dropped six zeros.

The question was posed: How to play on the US servers from Europe? The key is creating a Mythic master account and activating a US key on there, creating your WH login account at the same time. If WH is anything like DAoC, a Euro credit card will pay the monthly subs quite happily.

Sounds simple, but there are a couple of snags. You need to get a US game key, which means getting a US copy of the game. If you try the US Direct2Drive site, it’ll redirect you to the UK D2D site as soon as it sees your credit card billing address is not stateside (and it won’t accept Paypal for it either IIRC) and some US game retailer sites won’t even ship this particular game to Europe.

I’ve managed to get an international order from amazon.com (not .co.uk) accepted, together with the outrageous delivery charges. Only problem with this is that the Amazon.com open beta keys are fubar (I’m trying to get the issue resolved atm), although the early access key works and I have activated it ok.

Also, I imagine that the box won’t arrive for a couple of days after the live release date … so I will have a delay in getting my hands on the live release key. Still, Mythic mentioned (somewhere) that there would be a grace period of a few days to allow boxes to arrive.

Actually getting your hands on the US client, to download the game for open beta and early access is a simple (but long) matter of downloading the beta client torrent. From everything I have read, it should patch itself up to early access and then to release, at the appropriate times.

From my experience with DAoC, the last thing I want to do is play a game that forces me to deal with GOA in any way, shape, form, or fashion. So even if I actually did want to play on the Euro servers (for the better pings and timezone populations), I’d rather not play the game at all (or maybe have half my liver cut-out with a spoon) than have to deal with the incompetence and “laisse faire” that is GOA. As it is, most of my online gaming buddies are going to be on US servers, so hopefully I will be able to join them.

Just to note that I did get the beta and headstart key issues resolved with Amazon.com and I started playing US pretty much at the same time as everyone else, whereas Euros were completely screwed over :(